Readers of Heavy Metal Magazine, the most important romanian metal magazine, choose this album as the album of the year 1997 (in Romania, of course)
Includes Demo 1996 as bonus (tracks 05, 10 and 13)
Tracks 5, 10 & 13 are remixed versions of Deimos demo 1996: Deimos.
Tracks 15 to 17 are listed only in the booklet.
Recorded and mixed in December, 1995
Issued in a standard jewel case with clear tray, including a 4-page booklet.
ndustrial Death Metal from Deva, Romania
Initially released in April 1997 by Bestial Records on tape format, this classic Romanian Death Metal album, Deimos' debut full-length album "Insane", is now getting the CD treatment for the first time!
Awarded by the readers of THE Romanian Rock/Metal magazine of the time, Heavy Metal Magazine, with the title Best Album of the Year!
The CD version comes with an enhanced sound and as bonus the three tracks of the band's demo from 1996 with their original sound.
Some albums are designed to be approached as disruptive entities. Agents of chaos raining down provocations upon the listener, daring them to either buy into the experience or flee in pearl clutching horror. The aptly titled ‘Insane’ is a rarity even within the wildly experimental bowels of late 90s death metal. There is a free spirited daring at play which beats the listener over the head with its aggressive creativity when held against the self-styled experimental frontier of extreme metal in 2024.
Reissue culture is an odd one. On the one hand, it’s a way for Relapse Records to make an easy buck off the tattered husk of Death’s carcass. More benignly, it may just be a way to make popular but long out of print releases available to a hungry public. But when it comes to the more obscure artefacts of metal’s sagging underbelly, labels take on a degree of responsibility in calling the scene’s attention to forgotten tangents or possible worlds that the wider community may have forgotten.
That’s especially true of Loud Rage Music’s recent run of reissues that saw Ultimatum’s ‘Among Potential States’ reemerge in January, and now Deimos’s 1997 oddity ‘Insane’. Approaching this album immediately provoked these thoughts on what the purpose of the reissue really is. Because frankly, this album is a hot mess. But for the patient among the death metal listener base, a mess not only rich in enjoyment but wonderfully instructive on the extent and extremity of death metal’s entropic collapse by the late 90s.
Ostensibly, this is melodic death metal, but of a stripe that existed in a post ‘Heartwork’ universe. In many ways, the riff basis is decidedly worse than Carcass’s regrettable 1993 milestone, the thrash elements being funnelled through a groove metal filter before the work of melodic decoration can begin. Of this latter feature, there is a further distinctive Anglophone influence at play via an early gothic metal flavour. Fragments of Paradise Lost or Anathema are hacked up into surrealist chunks and thrown at the listener with a boisterous, stadium rock posture. Indeed, classic heavy metal seems to be the glue just barely holding these pieces together as they fly off in competing directions. It’s not so much the concoction of elements Deimos are working with here, it’s the manner in which they have chosen to deploy them, as if deliberately contriving each transition, hook, or link phrase to be as deviational to the last as possible, to the point that the musicians seem to be herding cats of their own making, manipulating style and cadence via an unfathomable methodology.
The final, laughably anarchic piece to this puzzle is a latent industrial metal aesthetic via programmed drums, jarring synth lines, and the occasional hint at full blooded techno. One way of reading this is a bold stirring of the pot, another alcove of late 90s progressive (small p) death metal playing with forms and conventions in a desperate attempt to resuscitate a dying genre. Another way to read it is the final detonation that makes the entire edifice of this album topple down. If one could swallow the odd blend of playful grooves, unapologetically flamboyant goth, and heavy metal bombast, the explosions of synthetic electronica scattered across these pieces will finally make one gag. There is no light touch here. This not a flavour. The industrial breaks are just that, they stop the momentum of the metallic elements in their tracks and wrest the entire musical project into utterly uncanny spaces. Bold to some, farcical to others.
Therefore, the most charitable reading of this album is that it gives the listener a severe dressing down. It bends, breaks, and remoulds their pretentions and sense of intellectual or artistic hygiene, in order for us to dust ourselves off and continue the project of framing “good taste” anew. The uncharitable reading is that this is an irretrievable mess. An accident of evolution that the scene rightly overlooked at the time, requiring no further reappraisal from a new generation.
The side of me that considers myself an adventurous listener wants to side with the former reading. If for no other reason than the increasingly rare pleasure of being able to honestly say that I’ve never heard an album quite like this. But this is caveated by the fact that music is not a universalist experience. From whatever counts as the objective perspective in this context, ‘Insane’ is a gauche, chimerical evolutionary dead end. One I will be returning to multiple times no doubt, like the scene of a fatal accident.
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